Biography and People

I have written about people, both historical and currently popular figures, from a sense of personal history. I began writing biographical material based on a personal connection to the subject (he was my great-grandfather) but continued when I found that understanding the personal journey of an individual through his or her historical setting brought both a better understanding of the person and personalized the history.

"The Last Tirah," a biography and collected writings of Edward Alexander Morphy

In April 1993, I received from my parents two boxes of old papers belonging originally to my father's "Grandfather Morphy." The family had always told stories of his exploits, how he had traveled the world as a journalist, that his oldest daughter, my father's "Auntie Kate", had been born in Singapore, and that he had worked for several newspapers in San Francisco at the close of his career. These two boxes contained all the family had saved of his original papers and articles. As I examined the contents of the boxes for the first time, I discovered that they contained some of his original, unpublished manuscripts, both finished and unfinished, copies of some of his published stories and articles cut from the magazines and newspapers in which they appeared, articles that had been written about him and his work by other journalists and columnists of his day, and hundreds of articles that had interested him, clipped from newspapers, grouped by topic, and placed in large envelopes. When I came upon a manuscript titled "Swai Kot, November 16, 1898", I realized that I had an historical document, an original journal entry written while he was a correspondent to the Pathan Revolt near the Khyber Pass, one that contained more vivid detail than I had seen published previously. The discovery so caught my imagination that it pulled me into a project to assemble the remnants of this remarkable career. More

“The Revised Adolphe Danziger de Castro,” a biography of Adolphe Danziger

While working on the Morphy biography, I came across a manuscript for a short story called "Mr. Lannigan's Error" with a by-line "Adolphe de Castro and E. A. Morphy." Clearly, for "The Last Tirah" I needed to establish who de Castro was and why this short story was the sole collaboration among Morphy's writing. A trip to the local university library yielded a surprise, de Castro was a writer of note and had published a book, Portrait of Ambrose Bierce. Reading the book lead me to discover more.

During his 99-year lifetime Adolphe Danziger was a rabbi, journalist, lawyer, dentist, American vice-consul to Madrid, and more. To the literary world, he is best known as one of Ambrose Bierce’s protégés and a one-time collaborator. Danziger wrote from early in his life until his death in 1959. Over the course of a seventy-year career, his writing included a collection of short stories, a novella in collaboration with Bierce, at least four volumes of poetry, five published and more than a dozen unpublished novels, a “photoplay” (film script), a published monograph of Talmudic history, an unpublished monograph about the history of Sephardic Jews, a biography of Bierce, and his own unpublished memoirs. He accomplished all of this in addition to an intermittent career as a journalist and editor, producing hundreds, possibly thousands, of articles and columns.

Despite this astonishing list of achievements, Danziger has gone all but unnoticed by history. He was mentioned briefly in biographies of Bierce, including some references to his Portrait of Ambrose Bierce. There are a couple of other references in the published letters of H. P. Lovecraft and in the recent biography, H. P. Lovecraft: A Life. Yet, the vast majority of his written work is obscure and difficult to obtain. The more accessible Portrait of Ambrose Bierce was as much about de Castro as it was about Bierce, yet it left many tantalizing questions unanswered. How could such an apparently accomplished man not leave a larger mark on history? How could someone have mastered so many identities and so many occupations, each requiring substantial training and expertise? Why did some of his contemporaries consider him to be the worst kind of vermin while others considered him a pillar of the community? With these questions to lead the way, my journey into discovering de Castro’s life began. More

Robert Picardo - During the late 1990's and 2000 I wrote an irregularly occurring column in Activate!, the fan club news letter for Robert Picardo who played the holographic doctor on Star Trek Voyager. What began as a personal favor to the newsletter's editor, turned into a unique opportunity to connect with televisions stars and begin to see them in a deeper sense. My own perspective of stars grew from a blushing fan to being able to see the parallels between my own life and those of our film and TV heroes.